Haywire by Brooke Hayward (android based ebook reader .txt) 📕

the Victory garden beyond through the panes of the vast picture window along the fourth side. There were four bedrooms and a sewing room that opened onto the balcony, each with checked gingham curtains and bedspreads individually colored (mine had green, Bridget’s yellow, Bill’s red, the nurse’s blue) and doors painted to match. The upstairs bathroom was about twenty feet long and had three sinks and toilets of gradated heights and a tub big enough to hold all three of us comfortably at the same time. Our meals were prepared downstairs in a kitchen with an oilcloth-covered table, in the center of which stood a detestable bottle of cod-liver oil. By the front door was a coat closet in which Bridget and I periodically locked Bill, with the threat that he would be devoured by a wolf concealed in the dark behind the coats and galoshes. Bridget and I, discovering that Bill was much more fun to dress up than our dolls, secretly renamed him Mary and trained him, under duress, to curtsy. (Curtsying was an enviable social grace outlawed by Mother, who brought us up to shake hands in a forthright way in spite of the fact that all her friends’ daughters with whom we played curtsied gracefully in their plumped-up organdies and shiny black Mary Janes.) One day, she brought Ginger Rogers (exhausted, Mother said, with the soles of her feet raw and bleeding from rehearsing some dance routine with Fred Astaire) over to The Barn to meet us. Bridget and I proudly produced Bill, his glorious curls restored, in a white challis dress sprigged with roses, outgrown by me and then Bridget. “How do you do,” he lisped to Ginger, curtsying faultlessly as he had been rehearsed under dreadful threats about the hall closet; “my name is Mary.” Mother let out a squawk of horror. Bridget and I were forbidden ever to dress him up again and the wolf was banished from the hall closet.

The Barn was pre-empted for the Thunderbird graduation party, and Bridget, Bill, and I had to spend that night in The Other House, as it was referred to. The preparations went on for days, with specially made homespun tablecloths and napkins and pillows, and pots of red geraniums and pink petunias all over the place. The festivities started in the afternoon and went on until dawn the next morning. Father allowed me to pick out what he was going to wear. His closets were as wonderful to me as the Arabian Nights; he had overseen their construction along an entire wall of his upstairs study, with particular attention to shoe racks and drawers for shirts and handkerchiefs. Father was a born collector. He had at least three hundred pairs of shoes, which rose in neat rows to the ceiling out of my sight. Of all these, he wore only six or seven pairs in rotation, he told me once when I begged him to dress for dinner in a pair of dapper white-and-tan saddle shoes that had caught my fancy. He also had a spectacular collection of shirts, and would never travel anywhere even for a week without thirty or forty of them. But it was his handkerchief collection that was really wondrous, housed in three huge drawers according to size and color. Bridget and I used to throw off our bathrobes whenever Father was dressing to go out to dinner, and wind each other up in our favorite handkerchiefs like saris, then dance madly around the study while Father shaved and splashed bay rum all over himself and us.

For the party, Father reluctantly agreed to wear the saddle shoes as well as an odd assortment of apparel that I laid out on the bed, including a white handkerchief with a Christmas tree Miss Mullens had helped me embroider.

Mother’s taste was Spartan in comparison to Father’s. She was always happiest in baggy old pants or shorts, barefoot or in sandals, but that day she exchanged her beloved gabardine shorts (“my uniform” she called them, and was still wearing the same pair sixteen years later) for a long dress of gay patchwork squares, designed by Adrian, in which she dashed about testing various seating arrangements. Bridget and I were speechless with admiration. Never had two people been more beautiful than Mother and Father. From time to time Mother would exclaim that she would never give another big party; then she would grab Father and whirl in his arms across the grass, her dress and his saddle shoes flashing among the tables on the lawn, to a waltz that only they could hear.

Suddenly, there was a small “combo” playing real music and hundreds of people strolling in the late-afternoon sun. Bridget and I flitted from one person to another in our pajamas and pink-eyed rabbit slippers, drunk with people and music. Every grownup we knew was there, our entire world; even Jimmy Stewart came home on leave, in his strange uniform. People clustered around him, congratulating him on having just been made a lieutenant; he had got an early draft number, the first or second pulled out of the hat, and gone into the Air Corps as an instructor up at Mather Field. He said everybody up there was leery of him, didn’t know what to do with him, and wanted to make him a morale officer, which made him sick to his stomach. He kept on bitching about it to Father and Father bitched to Ken McNaughton, an Air Force general who had been instrumental in helping him establish Thunderbird. From then on, Jimmy was on his way: first he went to Albuquerque and flew bombers, then to four-engine school and up to Boise, Idaho, where he ended up with his own combat crew. Once he got into flying, he said, it was all right, and once we got into the war and he was sent overseas to England, everybody was in the same boat and nobody paid any more attention to him. There